Tuesday, June 24, 2014

The following opinion piece was recently submitted to area newspapers by former Jackson County resident Lawrence Bay:

The
minimum wage is being raised to $15.00 an hour in many areas and
there are efforts to raise it nationwide. But why raise it to only
$15.00? Why not $100.00? Why not $1,000,000 per hour?

When
I started work in 1960 my dream was to make $2.50 per hour,
the minimum wage was $1.00 per hour. However in 1960 you could
buy a decent house for less than $15,000, a new car for less than
$2,000 or mail letters for four cents and post cards for one cent. A
carton of cigarettes was $1.80 and you would not believe how low
food and gasoline were. Night clubs were cheap: Frank Sinatra, Dean
Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. plus two drinks totaled $5.00. Are
real salaries higher now?

In
Turkey in 2000 everyone was a millionaire! But a million Turkish
Lire was worth 67 cents American. Of course you could buy very little
with a million Lire. Turkey, and other countries, saw the folly of
this and reformed their currencies. Does the United States wish to
become another Weimar Republic?

Raising
the minimum wage, and the resultant inflation, would wipe out the
assets of anyone with savings accounts or government bonds and
destroy anyone on a fixed income while moving workers into higher tax
brackets. It would do nothing to raise the standard of living for low
wage workers.

What
counts is not the salary but its purchasing power. Control
inflation. Raising the minimum wage solves nothing!